a practice journal by okrgr, a middle aged hacker trying to absorb the many lessons of ashtanga yoga

Monday, September 13, 2004

I'll probably only have time for a short note today. What's that? Thank god you say? I'm at work and may have to stop at any time to do stuff. I was in the OR this morning and afternoon. I finished just before four o'clock. I am on call tonight so I decided to try and get in some stretching or maybe even an abbreviated practice before I had to go on call. When I can get to the studio early enough, I have a series of stretches that I do as a pre-practice warm-up. I started with that today to see how I felt. One of first things that I do in this informal sequence is Virasana and Supta Virasana. That didn't feel too good today however. I was still pretty tight from standing in the OR for most of the day. When I went back for the supta part of it, I could feel tenseness in the high sacral area. I couldn't get my low back down to the ground. Nothing gave out, nothing hurt, a little uncomfortable maybe but no pain. When I later started doing the actual practice, I could tell on the very first up dog that my back was really stiff. It felt like it has in the past when I have tweaked that area. I kept going, thinking that doing the practice would loosen things up, and it did to a degree. When I got to Salabasana though, I had a really hard time getting any arch. Same for Bhekasana. Everything else went okay, but when I tried Ustrasana, it was such a struggle that I decided that I should stop there. I went on to try backbends. I could do Setu Bandha Sarvangasana but I couldn't get up into a real back bend. So I just did the rest of the closing sequence and rested. We'll see how it goes later in the week. Tomorrow is a rest day anyway since there's no class due to the new moon.

I was talking with one of my partners who does Iyengar yoga. She's now about 34 weeks pregnant. She's been able to maintain most of her usual practice but has had to gradually modify and eliminate some postures along the way. She told me she had to finally stop with headstand, the last inversion she was still able to do. It had been making her feel really light, despite all the weight of the baby, etc. pressing on her diaphragm in that position. But when she came down from the pose the last time she tried it, she had discomfort in her shoulders and tingling in her hands. So she decided to pull the plug on doing any more inversions. Now it's gonna be mostly standing poses for her until she recovers from delivery.